


Death's Other Kingdom

by Wildehack (Tyleet)



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2015-09-16
Packaged: 2018-04-19 12:22:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4746326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyleet/pseuds/Wildehack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"They found his body. Did anyone tell you?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The light returns Hannibal to awareness. It is harsh on the skin of his eyelids, red and demanding. With a vast effort, he manages to open his eyes, focusing on only that sense for now. Above him: the dark bluff and a familiar hubbub, shouts and sirens. Above that, only the full moon. The harsh light returns. A searchlight. They have found Francis, and followed the blood to him and Will. He finds he doesn’t mind. This way they will live.

“Is this what you wanted?” he asks, summoning forth the energy to turn his head to the side. But Will is not there, bleeding beside him. Hannibal is laid out on the black rock beneath the bluff like carrion, and around him is only white foam and black water.  
  
For the first time since Will slashed open the dragon’s belly, Hannibal feels a spark of fear. He remembers that Will’s body was tensed, clinging onto Hannibal until the moment of impact. It could have been Will’s body below his, when they hit the water. He is alone in the roiling Atlantic.

He briefly considers suicide, while the EMTs row out to get him. It would be easy, in this state—there’s a chance he’ll die anyway. All he’d need to do is slip over the side of the rock, and let the water do the rest. But he can find no pleasure in completing Will’s design for him. He cannot replace the touch of this artist. If he dies in surgery, it will still be at Will’s hand. That will have to be enough.  
  
So he simply closes his eyes again, returns to the moment only just past: Will’s head pressed to his chest, his hands fisted in Hannibal’s shirt, his breath hot and living against Hannibal’s skin.

The EMTs come in time. He survives.  
  
*

He is consigned to a series of transfusions and hospital rooms under heavy guard, as well as three separate surgeries—soldering the fracture of his left leg, broken when he hit the water, to a thin metal rod, among other things. He is kept under heavily sedating drugs, no doubt a precaution intended to keep him from following Abel Gideon’s example. He spends most of his time—when he can think clearly—in the chambers of his memory.

The first time Alana comes to visit him, he is waist-deep in a new room in the mind, one he did not consciously put there. Behind a wooden door in the crypt of the Norman Chapel is a stream in the woods, on a bright and clear day. Something watches from the trees, and every so often he feels the brush of cold scales against his side. He does not allow himself to rise completely out of the stream for Alana’s sake, but withdraws just far enough to carry on a conversation. He visualizes her on the far bank, her hair uncoiled about her shoulders, her bare feet skimming the surface of the water. 

“Hello, Alana,” he says, and there is a long, measured silence. She must be taking in the look of him, all the damage that Will’s design wrought on his body. The bullet wound, the broken leg, the cracked ribs.   
  
“Hello, Hannibal,” she says, finally. A dark shape beneath the water drifts towards her, pools at her feet.

“Well. Did you take my advice? Did you and Margot flee the country?”  
  
Her response is honest yet limited, as it always is. “You didn’t give us time. There were barely twenty-four hours between your escape and your arrest, and you only killed one man. Hardly the reckoning you promised me.”

Hannibal smiles, and the slick dark fingers of some watery creature encircle Alana’s white ankles, although naturally she does not notice. “I always keep my promises. I’ve told you that before.”  
  
There is a long and very cold pause. The hands use the opportunity to draw Alana into the water, wrapping lovingly around her waist, until her legs are submerged and she is only leaning against the bank. “That’s not true anymore. You've already broken a promise to me.”   
  
“I did not harm Will,” Hannibal replies evenly.  
  
“Then you failed to save him,” she says. Her voice is as distant as that crumbling bluff, as the waters below. A black-antlered head slowly breaches the surface, rising up before her. “Saving him was the deal, as I remember it.”

“I’m afraid you never understood him very well,” he tells her. “You still see him as the man you imagined he was when you met: a quietly suffering teacher. But he was never that man, not entirely. Will saved himself, Alana. His victory could only be more complete if I had left this world at his side.”  
  
“On that we agree,” she says. The creature pulls her in deeper, to the heart of the stream. Even Hannibal cannot tell how deep it goes. Only her pale eyes remain above the water when she adds: “They found his body. Did anyone tell you?”  
  
The stream and the creature abruptly vanish; his breath catches minutely in his chest. He is no longer inside his mind, but wholly in his body, only the thin membranes of his eyelids between him and reality. The stitched-up slit in his side gives a sickening throb, his leg seizes around the spiral of healing bone and metal in his shin. No one had told him.  

“Well. A piece or two of his body,” Alana says with deliberate cruelty, a tool she wields inexpertly, even after all this time. She isn’t cruel by nature; this is only what was done to her. “They found two fingers wedged between the rocks where they found you. The weight of his body tore him away.”  
  
His mind rushes through the scenario quickly, without passion: Will would have been awake, aware, when Hannibal was not. He must have used the last of his strength pulling Hannibal up onto the rock at the base of the cliff. His left shoulder was stabbed; he could not drag himself up, not after whatever trauma he sustained in the fall. He must have put his faith in the rock, trusting the crevasse and the fidelity of his body to keep him tethered. He must have decided, in those last moments, on the side of life. It doesn’t surprise him. Dragging Hannibal over the edge was the ultimate act of self-negation, sincere and whole-hearted. When it failed, of course Will would be unable to further deny himself. Of course he would have chosen to live. His body betrayed him in the same moment as his mind had finally reconciled itself. A terrible thing.

“He died trying to save himself,” Alana continues, very soft. She did love Will once—or the man Will imagined himself to be. They have always had that in common. “Would you still say you didn’t fail him?”

“I never failed Will,” Hannibal says, and finally opens his eyes. Alana is standing at the foot of the bed, and his feet are not cuffed, probably due to the incision on his left shin. He is far too weak to reach her, but he lets her see him flex his wrists, test the chains holding him to the bed. She takes a step back. “If I’ve failed, Alana, I have only failed you.”  
  
He allows himself a smile, and knows she understands him: he will not fail her again.

But when she leaves, he feels hollowed-out, unable to retreat to the cool of the stream. His mind is as quiet and meaningless as wind in dry grass.


	2. Chapter 2

Healing is slow and frustrating, as is grief. He’d thought once he was beyond grief, that the loss of Mischa had inoculated him forever against its hollowing touch. But he discovers yet again that when it comes to Will Graham, he is only human. Will’s shade walks unhindered through the rooms of Hannibal’s memory palace, transforming his mental refuge into a mined and dangerous field. This is what comes of welcoming someone in, of letting them know you so deeply. The only other person Hannibal has opened himself to is Bedelia, and Bedelia poses no threat: she is not built to devour. She saw to the heart of him but would never become him. He was in no danger of being engulfed by her.

Will had engulfed him, as he had engulfed Will. Changing, becoming, consuming and being consumed—they were all one. Hannibal knows with a marrow-deep certainty that during the three years Will had professed to forget him, his own shadow had waited in the hot darkness of Will’s mind, his own phantom touch had pressed against the interior of Will’s skull, locked away but not cut out. Hannibal finds himself similarly unable to cut Will out, or even to bury the memory of him in the garden where he keeps Mischa.

As a result, he spends a great deal more time in the waking world than he would like. The parade of fortified hospital rooms is an assault on his senses. Alana is his only visitor, although Frederick Chilton sends flowers. Cheap roses, thorns skinned off. They make him smile, although he is sure they were meant as a threat. A brave man, Frederick, although he never learns. Jack does not visit, although Hannibal rather thought he might.  
  
Alana visits him one day with her hair hanging long and loose as it did when he first knew her, smelling of upturned earth, Jack’s aftershave, and a light citrus scent that he has previously smelled on Will, that he thinks belongs to Molly Graham. “And how was Will’s funeral?” he asks her, and her mouth thins. She will give him no details about the service, and that irks him more than he cares to admit.  
  
“Which fingers did they find?” he asks her when she turns to leave.  
  
She stills, but does not turn around to look at him over her shoulder. “The ring finger and the little finger,” she says. “The left hand.”  
  
“Thank you,” Hannibal replies.

That night he dreams of Will’s corpse, swollen with seawater, face-up in the cold garden fountain of his childhood home. He lifts Will’s left hand tenderly up out of the water, brushing off the snail attempting to settle there. There are indeed only three fingers: primus, secundus, tertius, blue with death. Talon-like. He lets Will’s hand slide back below the surface, and climbs into the fountain himself. The chill settles around him like a blanket, Will’s cool flesh drifting against his side. Here is where Mischa lost her life. Beneath this water is where Will’s lungs struggled for breath.  
  
There are worse places to sleep.  
  
*

Eventually he is returned from Johns Hopkins, with great ceremony, to his usual cell in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He snaps his teeth at a nurse through the mask, just to watch him flinch, but otherwise returns quietly. He does not intend to stay forever, but he needs to heal for many months yet. The state may as well look after him while he recuperates.

Alana has restored his books, his drawings, all his small luxuries. As far as she is concerned, they have resumed the status quo, with only a few small changes: he must suffer the convoluted indignities of physical therapy, which requires a very complicated back-and-forth between effectiveness and security. Denise Barney, the orderly for Hannibal’s floor, is personally charged with reading every scrap of his mail before it reaches him. No more surprises. Then again, there are also no more correspondents he has any particular desire to reach. Chiyoh would not write, and neither would his aunt. Those he writes to have a terrible habit of not replying.

Nevertheless. He pens the usual cards to Margot, Jack, and Bedelia. Simple courtesies on their birthdays and Christian holidays. He knows Alana delivers these notes to Bedelia and Jack, but suspects Margot has never received so much as a whisper of his attention from her wife. Alana’s greatest fault, as a psychiatrist and as a lover, has always been her instinct towards protection. She would have protected Abigail from her own feelings, would have protected Will from the true shape of his own mind. She wants to protect the whole world from him, which is why she took on this post to begin with, his brave Dr. Bloom. He is certain Alana’s generosity is wasted on Margot, who as a child learned to defend herself against far worse horrors than anything Alana has known, even in the last few years. He occasionally wishes Margot would visit. She would benefit so much from continued therapy.

The numbing pattern of his recuperation is disrupted when Bedelia writes back for the first time in four years. The note is beautiful, on thick handmade paper, and her handwriting is familiar, looping and graceful. The staunch industrial smell of Denise’s hand sanitizer clouds the more complex scent Bedelia left on the parchment, and he has to swallow back his immediate rage. Denise cannot be blamed for completing her job as asked. This is another charge to lay at Alana’s door. Still. Despite the tampering, he detects Bedelia’s perfume, and beneath that the enduring scent of her fear.

 _In Italy you spoke to me about a former patient,_ she writes, delicately aware of the series of eyes that would reach it before his _. She came to represent for you the idea of the reversal of entropy. Hawking’s teacup, gathering itself back together and jumping back on the table. I have found myself dwelling on that image. I have lately felt compelled to reach out—in the light of your recent loss. Our ability to process grief stems from our intimate understanding of entropy, the animal knowledge that it cannot be reversed. The world cannot be reordered. Nothing can come back together after being so thoroughly shattered. If you have been holding out hope, Hannibal, I sincerely advise you to abandon it._  

Hannibal considers the letter very carefully, reading it several times. He flips it over, and on the back sketches the scene he has been avoiding for months now: the bluff, the rock, his own body laid out on slick stone like an offering for the waves, but small, from a great distance. Even smaller: the thin crack between his boulder and the one beside it, wider at the top and quickly narrowing, where Will’s torn fingers were preserved. The white-capped waves surrounding them, and beyond that foam and force, only the black of the Atlantic. From this distance, the house at the top of the bluff looks like a sailboat cresting at the top of a tsunami.  
  
When he is done, he leaves the sketch for Denise to find, for her to pass on to Alana or sell to Frederick Chilton or Tattlecrime as she pleases.

He closes his eyes, and enters the church-in-the-mind. A gruesome heart is waiting for him at the altar, pantomimed ventricles and corpuscles and genuine muscle. The Italian grandmothers are praying before it, the choirboy sings his sweetest song. Hannibal goes to the heart, strokes one flayed-open thigh, and feels it pulse beneath his hand. The heart is beating, then unfolding, becoming a man again, a reversed metamorphasis. It is not Anthony Dimmond, but Will, as Hannibal knew it would be. He stands, naked and bloodied and unsympathetic as he had been in Hannibal’s house when the bullet shattered Hannibal’s wine glass. Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, there is this.  
  
“Transubstantiation is only bread into flesh,” Hannibal says to his own memory. “And wine into blood. This is a transformation rather more difficult.”  
  
Will shrugs, blood sluicing over his bare shoulders. “You said you didn’t know what I would change into. You could only whisper through the chrysalis.”  
  
“I didn’t change you into a god,” Hannibal says.  
  
“No,” Will says. The blood has become wings, stretching up beautifully behind him. Hannibal reaches out to touch one, and it parts like a waterfall over his fingers. “But if you can’t beat God. You become Him.” Will gives him a look of restrained sorrow. “You taught me that.”  
  
Hannibal feels abruptly dizzy, as if all the blood is his—as he supposes it is. Technically. “So I did,” he agrees.

*

Bedelia’s letter prepares him for the visitor he receives a fortnight later. Jack Crawford, in a deliciously towering rage, manila folder bent and gripped in one tight hand.  

“You’ve been communicating with someone again,” Jack states. Alana is at his side, a furrow between her brows. She knows that the measures she has taken almost entirely preclude the possibility of such a thing happening again without her knowledge. Denise Barney is too well-paid and well-watched to pass Hannibal messages. His mail is not only surveilled but analyzed before it reaches him. There have been no phone calls in months.  
  
“It’s good to see you, Jack,” Hannibal says, and it is. Hope is a small flickering heat in his gut, lit by Bedelia and left to warm his still-soft scar tissue. “But I’m afraid I haven’t the slightest notion what you mean.”  
  
Jack steps imprudently close to Hannibal’s cage. He could be across the floor in minutes and reach through one of those holes in the glass, get his hand around Jack’s throat. He remains where he is, hands clasped loosely behind his back. “If you’re not doing it now, you did it at some point,” Jack says, his eyes narrowed.

“You’ve become relevant again, Hannibal,” Alana says with deliberate coolness. She’s trying to cool Jack down, not him, but she stays well back from the glass herself.  
  
Hannibal tilts his head to the side. “Something terrible must have happened,” he says lightly. “Jack only gets this worked up when innocent people are involved. That’s our Agent Crawford. Always on the side of the victims.” He makes a small clicking sound with his tongue. “Which makes it harder to understand the killers, doesn’t it? You’ve lost your bloodhound, but I’m afraid I’ll make a poor replacement. I’d look elsewhere to fill your kennels.”  
  
“I don’t need you to replace Will,” Jack says cleanly, but his jaw is tight. “I need you to _explain this_ ,” he says, and thrusts the crushed manila folder into Hannibal’s cage, where it lands on the floor.  
  
With exquisite care, Hannibal lifts up the folder and takes it to his table. He smoothes out the creases as best as he can before opening it. “This may take a while,” he notes, for the benefit of his audience.  
  
“Take your time,” Alana answers drily.  
  
“As you say,” Hannibal replies, and opens up the folder.

Within: wonders. The photographs are of a crime scene every bit as elaborate as the best of Hannibal’s own, staged in a motel bedroom. A man—white, middle aged, silver-haired—has been murdered. Strangled nearly to death, if Hannibal is not mistaken. But that was not the cause of death. He has been disemboweled, his intestines carefully unspooled, wrapped around his wrists and nailed to the ceiling. His gut is also coiled around his own throat, dark ligature marks spreading out from it like blood sinking into water. It keeps his head upright, his blood-black eyes facing the viewer. The impression is half-martyr, half Punch and Judy. It is a deeply beautiful scene, the devastated saint transmuted into a divine puppet, good only for the cheap catharsis of simulated violence. Faith interpreted as simple understanding of control.

It is a moment before Hannibal can speak. When he does, his voice is utterly calm. “Was the gut opened up after death?”  
  
A cold pause. “Before,” Jack tells him.  
  
A small smile touches Hannibal’s lips. “And there are organs missing.”  
  
“The thymus and the pancreas,” Jack confirms.  
  
“The sweetbreads,” Hannibal says, warmth suffusing his chest. “Surgically removed, I take it?”  
  
“Correct,” Alana says.  
  
Hannibal closes the folder, having committed the contents to memory. He cannot help but rest his hand on top of it while it sits before him, the paper cool and smooth to the touch. “I’m afraid I can only tell you what you already suspect. This is the copycat.”  
  
“The Chesapeake Ripper copycat,” Jack says, clipped and furious, “was Abel Gideon. Abel Gideon is dead.”

“Then it must be the Chesapeake Ripper,” Hannibal tells him, and his heart is glad and light.

*  
  
After Jack leaves, Alana returns alone. She's wearing white again, in an expensive linen more to Margot's taste than her own, making her appear brighter than she should, her hair blending in with the shadows in the room. A white lamb in the dark.  
  
“Jack doesn’t want to ask this yet,” she says, “but I will.”  
  
“Brave Alana,” Hannibal says, allowing his fondness to steal into his voice. “Ask your question.”  
  
“Is it him,” she asks, unflinching. “Is it Will?”  
  
“Will Graham is dead,” Hannibal reminds her. “You told me so yourself.”

“Was I wrong?” she asks, and there are lines of sweet and terrible strain about her eyes now.  
  
He thinks of those fingers embedded in stone, the frozen supplication of a dead man’s hand. “Oh no,” he says. “You were quite right. Will died in the cold Atlantic.” 

“That’s what you said to me,” she says, almost in a whisper, but her eyes stay fixed on him. “When you said I died in your kitchen.” 

“Death comes in a different guise for each of us,” he tells her. “But I suppose there is a similarity. You were given a choice. So was Will.”  
  
“He chose death,” she says, and she means that he chose suicide, he chose murder.  
  
“Just as you did,” Hannibal says, and smiles at her.  


	3. Chapter 3

Hannibal spends the next few months in a haze of relief so profound it feels physical. Almost a year after his escape, he is nearly healed in body, although the wounds to his spirit continue to knit and scar. His mind remains plagued by Will, and although the threat of those visions has diminished, they make it hard for him to rest. Being left alone now is utterly unlike being left alone after surrendering himself to the FBI. Then, he believed Will had rejected him, that by giving himself a fixed point in the world he was also fixing himself in Will’s psychic geography. Denying Will the right to lose him, or forget him. Now, he knows he is not rejected, will no longer be denied. Loneliness and impatience are aches as sharp as any of his injuries, although neither comes close to the pain of grief.

Jack brings him scraps of news, and Hannibal condescends to feed him crumbs in exchange: the first body will have been from out of town, moved to the motel overlooking Chesapeake specifically for the associative benefits. The victim will have been taken at his home. He will be a criminal; a man in need of repentance.  
  
As it turns out, the victim is the Las Cruces Strangler. Dear Jack had taken Will out to New Mexico only five years earlier, looking at tableaux of strangled boys. His face when he returns to Hannibal’s cell is not despairing or even guilt-wracked; he exhausted those emotions long ago, first with Miriam Lass and later at Bella’s side. The well of his anger is far from dry, but it is no longer a passionate fury. Jack’s anger seeps into him like water into rock. Jack’s anger is a cancer, rooted inside him and making him ever wearier.

“It isn’t Will,” Jack says, almost threateningly. “A three-fingered man did not strangle Timothy Murdoch with his own intestines. The bruises don’t lie.”  
  
“Of course not,” Hannibal says, unconcerned. He could have used a prosthesis. Or he could have an accomplice. Or perhaps Jack is lying to him, trying to provoke an emotional response. “Besides, Will Graham had a wife, a child that he loved very much. Why ever would he give those things up to become a nameless killer?”  
  
“You didn’t call him a nameless killer,” Jack replies, snatching up the thread. “You called him the Chesapeake Ripper. You gave him your name.”  
  
Hannibal raises an eyebrow. “Aren’t you going to tell me Will Graham is dead?”  
  
“Will Graham is dead,” Jack says in a heavy way, and leaves.  
  
Only a few short months ago those words would have left him hollow, the thin shell of his mind packed with such insubstantial things as straw and dry wind. Now he feels both full and empty, as if there are waves inside him, as if his body can barely contain a black ocean and a light on a cliff.

Jack does not tell him about the second victim. Presumably he is tired of Hannibal’s smiles. 

Instead, he learns about it from Freddie Lounds, quite indirectly. Denise has recently subscribed to Tattlecrime, and reports the contents of the latest article during one of their late-night conversations.  Hannibal reconstructs this third-hand report into a perfectly acceptable _mise en scene_ , filed beside Randall Tier’s broken jaw in the crypt he has devoted to Will.

The second victim is David Palmer, from Louisiana. He is murdered at home, in his own back yard, but his body is moved, displayed at the small and dingy local playground. Again there is an air of the saint about him, naked and caught in the act of suffering, his red hair spattered with blood. His arms are wound through the monkey bars, hands bound together, keeping him there. His feet barely skim the ground. His throat was cut, his head tilted back in the killer’s hands while he bled out. Tenderly, Hannibal imagines, in remembrance of a different prey. His liver is missing, surgically removed.  
  
Freddie does not call him the Chesapeake Ripper, or a copycat. Either she has grown wiser since baiting the dragon, or she has made her own guesses as to the identity of this new killer. She calls him the Puppeteer.  
  
Freddie relates that a photograph was found inserted into the incision on David Palmer’s throat, of an unidentified girl. Maybe six or seven years old.    
  
“The girl will be his daughter,” he explains to Denise. “Or perhaps his niece, or much younger sister. A very close relation. She will have gone missing long ago.”  
  
“So you’re saying the Puppeteer is a vigilante?” Denise asks. He has no doubts that she will report back to Alana anything he says. Additionally, there are cameras in the room. Surely by now Alana has added sound, or hired someone who can read lips.  
  
“Not a vigilante, no,” he replies, easing the ghost of a chuckle into his voice. “I think he is simply slaking his hunger on those he has long desired to devour.” It was the same for Hannibal, when he was young. First his enemies, then those who reminded him of his enemies, and so on. “This is a man who has hurt children, and he has been punished accordingly.”

“Sounds like a vigilante to me,” Denise remarks.  
  
“You’re mistaking the means for the ends,” Hannibal tells her. “His goal is not punishment. That’s merely the method, a nod towards justice. He is familiar with justice, although he does not feel bound to it any longer.”  
  
“So what’s his goal?” she asks.  
  
“Satiation,” Hannibal tells her, and allows himself a moment to imagine it: familiar hands laying out the tender morsels of the body onto a cutting board, butcher’s knife handled with ease and pleasure. Uncomplicated dishes—nothing that Hannibal himself would serve. Dishes a rural family man might know. Sliced liver and onions, perhaps. With grilled sweetbreads, crisped exteriors marvelously contrasting with their rich and creamy interiors, fresh and beautiful on the tongue. Taste and smell are the senses most closely linked to memory. The tongue remembers more than the brain is able to process. Those who dined at Hannibal’s table carry the memory of those pleasures with them always, the ghostly imprint of his work living dormant in their mouths. If David Palmer’s murderer is somewhere dining on his offal, his tongue will be delicately offering him sense-memories of Hannibal. He feels saliva rise in his own mouth at the thought.  

“What was your goal, Dr. Lecter?” Denise asks him. She’s sharp, to guess where his thoughts are tending.  
  
“Satiation,” Hannibal says, and gives her a wink.

*  
  
Alone, he retreats into his skull.  
  
He is unable to prepare. The emotions Will provokes in him have always been too raw and too unfamiliar to constrain. It has taken all his energy simply to understand them. He waits, eyes closed, expecting at any moment the touch of a mutilated hand, the weight of a familiar gaze.  
  
Weeks pass, and it does not come.  
  
*  
  
Alana gives Denise new instructions that preclude conversation, and is able to monitor her obedience via the keycard swipes in and out of Hannibal’s antechamber.  
  
“Very rude of you,” Hannibal tells her. “Denise has quite a fine mind. I believe she’s pursuing a second degree online in her spare time.”  
  
“I’m not allowing you the pleasure of conversation,” Alana tells him frankly.  
  
“Not even a token protest for Denise’s sake?” he asks, amused. “You’ll allow me the pleasure of _your_ conversation.” It is in Alana’s nature to conflate selflessness and jealousy. She will try to save the world by preserving private and intimate access to her own most terrible nightmare. Occasionally he has found this endearing.  
  
“I direct your therapy, Hannibal,” she says, with a thin smile. “I’m legally obligated to converse with you.”   
  
“Of course,” he says. “And what shall we converse on?”  
  
“I thought the Puppeteer,” she says, with only the faintest trace of hunger in her voice. By now she has learned to control the mingled horror and hope she feels at the possibility that Will Graham is alive, but she has not banished it completely. He considers his response, and the hunger builds in the set of her mouth while she waits.  
  
“Do you know St. Lucy?” he asks her. It is not a non sequitur, although he is aware it seems so to her.  
  
“I’m Jewish,” she says. “Which I know you remember.”    
  
“And yet you are no doubt familiarized yourself with Catholic iconography, as the doctor in charge of my therapy,” he says with patience. His Italian murders alone would merit the study.  
  
She surveys him in silence for a moment, and then answers in a clipped voice. “St. Lucy refused to marry a pagan, and was tortured to death. They plucked out her eyes.”  
  
“And they grew back,” Hannibal reminds her. “God granted her that last possibility of vision, when her body lay in the coffin.”  
  
“An empty gift,” Alana says.  
  
“Oh,” Hannibal says. “Not empty, I think.”

He has had a great deal of time to perfect his design for Alana.  
  
To honor the choice she made in his kitchen, he will consecrate her to the image of courage. With exquisite attention, he will remove her eyes. This will not kill her, and he will set them delicately in a little golden dish. He will help her with a chemical compound to keep her stiff and still, aware and able to speak but unable to stop him from sliding her arms into the white sleeves of a gown like a doll. A fine yet simple dress, as she wore when they met. He will carve a deep ribbon of blood into her waist, to form the martyr’s red sash. Like Lucy, she will make a wonderful martyr. Like Lucy, she will be given the evidence of her blindness and her bravery to hold in her upturned palms. Her hollow gaze will look out at the world she died to protect for hours, if he is precise enough with the dosage. She will bleed out very slowly, and he will stay with her all the while. He would never leave her alone in the dark. Finally he will harvest her dear, familiar tongue, and that will be his to keep.  
  
“Does Jack believe the Puppeteer is Will Graham?” he asks her. “I know that’s not what he says, but do you think it’s what he believes?”  
  
“I think he’s considering multiple possibilities,” she says, steeled against him.  
  
Hannibal watches her carefully as he asks his next question, the little lines at the corners of her mouth, the tightening of her eyes. “Has he left Molly and her child out in the open, bait for one of those possibilities? Or has he hidden them away, just in case?” Her jaw clenches, her eyes narrow just a fraction, and he knows he is right. 

“I see,” he says. “So why not you, Alana? Why not return to whatever bolthole you have made for yourself, for Margot and your child? Why stay here?”  
  
“Will wouldn’t hurt me,” she tries, but the answer is thin, threaded with doubt. He does not bother to address the lie; lets her read his contempt for the answer in his raised eyebrow.

“I don’t believe Will would hurt my son,” she corrects herself. She is pale with her own honesty, the reality she has been forcing herself not to examine too closely. “Or Margot.”  
  
“So little care for your own well being,” he murmurs. “If I were still your colleague, Alana, I would tell you to leave the country, despite what your heart tells you.”  
  
She gives a sudden, bitter smile, and meets his gaze directly. “I couldn’t leave without you,” she says, and this is perfectly true.

*  
  
Hannibal learns of the Puppeteer’s third victim at two in the morning, when the lights in his cell abruptly flicker on. A moment later Jack bursts into the anteroom with three officers flanking him, real fear on his face until the moment that he registers Hannibal lying on his cot, head tilted to the side in curiosity. Alana follows just behind, hair spilling loose over her misbuttoned coat, clearly summoned directly from bed. He can smell Margot on her. She is plainly furious. “As you can see,” she hisses as Jack stalks towards the glass, “he’s still here.”

“I want to review the tapes,” Jack tells her while staring grimly at Hannibal. Alana goes pink with anger at the implication—deservedly, in Hannibal’s opinion. He cannot think of a single method by which he would be communicating with anyone in the outside world, except the method which Jack himself enacts. 

“Has something happened?” Hannibal asks pleasantly, sitting up.

“Dr. du Maurier,” Jack snaps, “told me that she would not die at any hand but yours. That you made her that promise.”

 “Has something happened to Bedelia?” he asks, and stands. Jack is correct. He has been saving Bedelia’s death for a very long time, knowing that as her understanding of him deepened he would savor her all the more. With the exception of his aunt, Bedelia is the person who knows him best in the world. Will _understood_ him, perfectly and brutally, but he has been opening doors for Bedelia in his mind for many long years now. He would be very disappointed if she managed to escape him after all.

“Something happened,” Jack agrees, his eyes narrowed. “And she’s laying the blame at your door.”

So: not murder, at least. Hannibal gives a restrained smile. “Of what am I accused?"   
  
“That’s enough,” Alana interrupts sharply. “Jack, we can resume our previous discussion in my office, but I am ending this conversation now.” Her gaze is on Hannibal, pale and careful, and Jack visibly tempers his anger with Alana’s suspicion, tightening his jaw.  
  
Hannibal fights down the hot wave of frustration that rises up in him. “Until next time,” he tells Jack politely, to see Jack give that last look over his shoulder. Alana is the last to leave the room, and she does not look back. A minute later and he is once again immersed in darkness.  
  
Alone in the dark it is harder to banish the rage. Bedelia is his to hurt, his to kill, his to consume. He could imagine consigning some part of her to Will—Will who has become him—but cannot pretend he would not begrudge it. He has fed her too many of his secrets, has always intended to swallow her whole. Like Alana, Bedelia belongs to him.  
  
And yet. A dark thrill is tangled with his anger, some animal satisfaction that Will would dare to take this from him. It is not a desire he is familiar with in any other context: an unhappy and ardent desire to be overtaken. To be changed, as he changed Will. His pulse quickens, his breath comes less steadily. The demands of adrenaline make themselves known.  
  
He forces himself to return to his cot, to inhale and exhale calmly. These are the facts of the situation: Will has touched and changed what Hannibal has reserved for himself. There will be a message—outside of violation, beyond Will’s hands on parts of Hannibal no one else has touched—and there is no way he can learn it without more information. There is no point now in assigning blame, in planning retribution.

He lies down. He closes his eyes, retreats inward. As he steps into the anteroom of his memory, a thought brushes against him. He does not have Will’s gift, gains no insight into a killer’s heart by looking at his victims. He does not know what Will’s actions will be, despite his hopes.  
  
He does not know if Will will come for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaand there will be one more part after this. i estimated wrong. :)

**Author's Note:**

> I am also wildehack on tumblr, if you want to come be emotionally compromised with me. The title et al is from "the hollow men".


End file.
